Category: history

Peace! … I want you to know about new work. Your insight and any references you suggest I explore, are invaluable to my process of planning and actualization. Thank you in advance.

Krewe Coumbite is a sonic instrument of study in Black and Indigenous Diasporas ecology and vernacular rhythms documented from 1940s til current. The work focuses specifically on vernacular of cultural musings expressed in: noise, chants, stories, lullabies, narratives around naming, Cultural sayings/proverbs/recipes, and in working-class rituals such as public transit, migration, service work, and in community gatherings. Continue reading

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MsyOe7xCqg[/youtube]The New Sound of Music is a fascinating BBC historical documentary from the year 1979. It charts the development of recorded music from the first barrel organs, pianolas, the phonograph, the magnetic tape recorder and onto the concepts of musique concrete and electronic music development with voltage-controlled oscillators making up the analogue synthesizers of the day. EMS Synthesizers and equipment are a heavily featured technology resource in this film, with the show’s host, Michael Rodd, demonstrating the EMS VCS3 synthesizer and it’s waveform output.

People have used machines to make music since the appearance of the machines themselves. There is plenty information about the evolution of music-making machines on the web, and even a whole community dedicated to it that looks actually as it was made around same time.

Watch James Houston’s masterpiece Big Ideas: Don’t get any – Radiohead cover to get a flavor of the topic.

Artist-technologist Honor Harger listens to the weird and wonderful noises of stars and planets and pulsars. In her work, she tracks the radio waves emitted by ancient celestial objects and turns them into sound, including “the oldest song you will ever hear,” the sound of cosmic rays left over from the Big Bang. Related.

50 years ago this month (April 2008), the most celebrated electronic music studio in the world was established. We trace the history of the Radiophonic Workshop, talking to the composers and technical staff who helped to create its unique body of work — Steve Marshall

image: Before the Workshop: Daphne Oram manipulates a tape loop at Broadcasting House, watched by Frederick Bradnum, 1956 or ’57

I was 10 years old. As the last ‘whoosh’ of the Doctor Who theme dissolved into a wash of tape echo I sat transfixed by the light of the television, eagerly reading all of the end credits. “Wow!” I exclaimed. “I want to get a job in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop when I grow up!”

“I’m sorry, son,” said my father. “You won’t be able to do both.”Continue reading

The First Computer Musician by R. Luke Dubois :: an article in the New York Times: 06/08/2011 ::

If the difference between 1911 and 2011 is electricity and computation, then Max Mathews is one of the five most important musicians of the 20th Century. – Miller Puckette

photo by Roger Linn

In 1957 a 30-year-old engineer named Max Mathews got an I.B.M. 704 mainframe computer at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N. J., to generate 17 seconds of music, then recorded the result for posterity. While not the first person to make sound with a computer, Max was the first one to do so with a replicable combination of hardware and software that allowed the user to specify what tones he wanted to hear. This piece of music, called “The Silver Scale” and composed by a colleague at Bell Labs named Newman Guttman, was never intended to be a masterpiece. It was a proof-of-concept, and it laid the groundwork for a revolutionary advancement in music, the reverberations of which are felt everywhere today….

Halim El-Dabh composed his first experimental piece in Cairo in 1944, his work can be related to other pioneers such as Luigi Russolo, John Cage, Walter Ruttmann, and Pierre Schaeffer. The official history of experimental and electronic music is mostly centered around three starting poles : Paris, Cologne, New York and then everything seems to have spread all over the Western civilization. This is what C-drík learned when he studied electro-acoustic music at the conservatory. Most contemporary media introduces us to Western electronic music as if nothing else existed, the West is self-centered and consciously or not often denies the others the right to express themselves. Continue reading

Looking at Music 3.0:: February 16 – June 6, 2011 :: The Yoshiko and Akio Morita Media Gallery, second floor, The Museum of Modern Art :: the third in a series of exhibitions exploring the influence of music on contemporary art practices, focuses on New York in the 1980s and 1990s. In this dynamic period, imaginative forms of street art spread across the five boroughs, articulating the counter-culture tenor of the times. As the city transitioned from bankruptcy to solvency, graffiti, media, and performance artists took advantage of low rents and collaborated on ad hoc works shown in alternative spaces and underground clubs. Appropriation, also known as remixing, thrived. Continue reading